On Friday evening, President Donald Trump launched a meme coin named $, whose price exploded in 48 hours.
Trump’s official X account has been released:
“My NEW official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW,”
The coin’s official website resembles those that sold and promoted its past NFT collections and is credited to CIC Digital, the same official that licensed its NFTs.
Out of 1 billion coins, the website says 80% are locked and will be gradually unlocked over a three-year period. As such, the circulating supply will only be 200 million tokens, putting the fully diluted valuation of $74 billion at its peak on Sunday.
This makes the coin worth more than Royal Caribbean Cruises (NYSE:), Schlumberger (NYSE:), Target (NYSE:), Hilton, Metlife (NYSE:), Aflac (NYSE:), Snowflake (NYSE:), General Motors (NYSE:), Allstate (NYSE:), Barclays (LON:) and Occidental Petroleum (NYSE:). 
On paper, President Trump increased his wealth by $60 billion in 48 hours, based on the pre-crash record price.
The $TRUMP meme coin traded at $74 at one point, before the sale began. The total supply is 1 billion and 200 million are in circulation. Thus, the total market capitalization was $74 billion. On paper, President Trump’s unrealized profit was approximately $60 billion, 80% of which is not outstanding. It only took 36 hours to generate this paper profit. for the new American president.
To put this into perspective:
- The peak profit of SBF’s crypto paper was around $30 billion.
- Satoshi’s portfolio made a paper profit of around $50 billion in October, now around $110 billion. Remember, this took 15 years, not just part of a weekend.
He was probably at one point the largest living crypto-billionaire in history. President Trump’s gains have surpassed those of 1947.
As of Friday afternoon, President Trump’s net worth was estimated at around $9.2 billion, half of which was made up of the meme stock $DJT. As of Sunday morning, it was about $70 billion. What a weekend.
An 80% stake in Donald Trump’s meme coin, $TRUMP, is owned by subsidiaries of the Trump Organization, according to Bloomberg. These affiliates are called CIC Digital LLC and a related entity called Fight Fight Fight LLC.
In total, 800 million coins will be unlocked over the next 3 years. With $500, Trump will become richer than Elon Musk. At $2,100, President Trump will exceed . All without producing anything of economic value.
But that remains to be seen. After the initial push, the meme coin later sank. At the time of writing, the coin is trading near $39, representing a nearly 45% pullback from the high.
Clearly, TRUMP’s meme corner weekend story raised many eyebrows. How can a financial instrument be worth $70 billion without having any economic value or tangible assets behind it, in less than 48 hours?
How can the new President of the United States be behind this meme and make such (unrealized) gains in 48 hours?
Behind these legitimate comments, let’s be a little polemical and ask ourselves if there is a financial logic behind these memes.
First of all, what are meme coins?
Meme coins, whose popularity is largely driven by pop culture, often have an abundant supply and are generally very volatile.
- and are the main meme coins, although there are hundreds more available.
- To have a thorough understanding of a coin, one must verify that liquidity pools are linked to burn addresses, ensure that third-party audits have been performed on the project, and confirm that no entity owns more than 5% of the total supply.
- The reputation of meme coins, which offer no clear use case or benefit, is changing with the emergence of utility meme coins.
Source: www.crypto.com
Meme Coins: Connecting Brand Recognition and Social Capital
Although it remains the cornerstone of the crypto ecosystem, the rise of alternative tokens, particularly meme coins, has received considerable attention: initially described as “shitcoin” and a pure speculative bet, meme coins such that Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and others have become an important segment. of the crypto space. Their unique ability to mingle, their social media culture, their community dynamics, and their financial speculation have opened up new possibilities for investors, especially individuals.
Meme coins possess an inherent advantage in widespread brand recognition.
Here’s my point: how many investors can name the biggest tech companies in Spain, Japan or Brazil? Most likely very few. Yet millions of investors around the world have heard of Dogecoin, memorizing the Shiba Inu dog icon and being influenced by the credence given to this meme coin by Elon Musk. This highlights a unique attribute to meme coins: their ability to captivate attention on a global scale and engage audiences in a way that traditional financial assets cannot.
As mentioned in a dedicated report by Murad Mahmudov, traditional asset theories assume that investors are fully rational and exploit all available information when choosing between risky assets. However, extensive research, such as Kahneman’s seminal work on attention (1973), highlights the limits of human attention and cognitive decision-making capacity. Meme pieces capitalize on these limitations by appealing to emotions, humor and shared cultural narratives, rather than relying solely on utility or fundamentals, Mahmudov added.
It is important to note that there is no equivalent to meme coins in the Web 2 ecosystem. Meme coins stand out as a phenomenon unique to Web 3, blending decentralized technology and cultural and social capital of a way that traditional Web 2 frameworks cannot replicate.
Four advantages of meme coins
In the same aforementioned report, Mahmudov highlights some key benefits of meme coins.
- Affordability
Millennials and Generation Z are increasingly attracted to cryptocurrencies like meme coins, seeing them as a high-risk, high-reward opportunity for wealth creation. The low initial price per token reinforces the affordable aspect. Some experts believe we could see “hyper-mecoinization” before we see hyper-bitcoinization.
- Accessibility
Meme Coins can be traded 24/7 on centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase (NASDAQ:) as well as decentralized exchanges like . The constant availability and access makes meme coins much more accessible to digital natives than traditional asset classes.
- Transparency
Dogecoin does not claim to replace fiat currency or traditional payment systems. Still, it has found niche cases, like facilitating value transfers in certain countries and allowing traders to move funds between exchanges for arbitrage opportunities. The transparency and simplicity of “honest meme coins” appealed to retail investors disappointed by over-promised utility coins.
- Regulatory Compliance
Developers of utility parts with real-world applications often face scrutiny and potential sanctions from regulators.
In contrast, meme coins that position themselves as humorous, low-stakes tokens signal their lack of utility and non-security status, thereby minimizing regulatory risk. This attracts retail investors even more, although there are also many scams in this area.
Conclusion
Beyond some shocking and controversial aspects of the official launch of the Trump meme this weekend, we believe this event could strengthen the meme coin phenomenon, as more celebrities, famous athletes and thought leaders could be encouraged to launch their own meme coins.
The real winner of this meme coin craze could potentially be Solana (SOL). The token reached a lifetime high of $275 as President Trump’s choice of Solana as its issuance network increased demand and sentiment for the Solana blockchain and token.
Solana’s well-established ecosystem, supported by continuous upgrades, continues to dominate the DeFi and NFT sectors, while Solana’s focus on high-throughput, low-cost transactions redefines blockchain scalability .